The Amazing Power of Premium Domain Names in Branding and SEO

When launching a new business, your business name and domain name should be your number one thing to thoroughly evaluate. This is because your domain will heavily influence your brand’s visibility, perception, and overall SEO score. 

If you haven’t thought about how your site design will influence your SEO health, the time is now. 

You can start by picking out a domain name that is quite similar to your business name and offers enough SEO help. 

In this article, we’ll be reviewing several ways your domain name can affect your branding and SEO. Keep reading to find out more 

It Establishes Your Business Identity

The first impression they say lasts longer. In this case, your domain name will be the first contact anyone would have with your brand. It is the digital footprint of your business and it plays a huge role in how people perceive your brand. 

This is why you should only go for premium domain names that emphasize what your business is all about. 

For example, if you have a restaurant and your domain name is “www.foodiesfirst.com” it’ll leave an impression that your business is centered around food. 

So having a descriptive domain name like this makes it easy to sell to your target market. You don’t have to spend time and additional marketing resources, explaining what your business entails. 

Using these types of descriptive business-centered domain names also helps you increase your online visibility. Because searchers trust your brand based on your name, they tend to visit your website more.

In this example below, anyone who comes in searching for an auto repair shop would be more compelled to click on the Who Can Fix My Car search results instead of the angel recovery result. 

This is because the former domain name has established its identity as an expert in the business and so, users can immediately trust them to efficiently deliver that service. 

So spend time identifying a descriptive domain name that’ll immediately leave a clear impression of your business. We recommend using the same name as your business name for a lot more clarity.

It’s Easy to Remember and Find Your Brand

When you choose a premium domain name, it’ll most likely be short, simple, and easy to remember. This is because a name that isn’t catchy or memorable, will not stick to anyone. 

For example, let’s say you run an electronics online store and you decide to pick a domain name that says “www.brownleatheroj.com” people will barely remember the name of your store. They’ll always know it had something to do with colors, but they won’t remember the exact name. This is because it wasn’t in any way related to your business.

However, when you choose a simple name like “www.brownelectronics.com” it leaves a more sustainable impression. 

When you have a memorable domain name, anyone can easily refer people to your business. So you don’t have to spend extra effort in putting together a referral marketing plan. You can simply incorporate this into your future marketing materials. 

If the name is short and simple, people will not be prone to misspellings and other errors. So you don’t have to worry about misleading your potential users or sending them to the wrong website. 

Arrive, formerly known as Parkwhiz, is a brand that allows companies and brands easily offer parking along with other mobility. They realized not only did the name Parkwhiz do nothing for them in professional branding, but it was also susceptible to misspellings and other errors. So they rebranded to Arrive and bought the domain “Arrive.com”.

According to them ‘The Arrive brand represents the culmination of our evolution as a company…” 

Also, it’s easier to remember and faster to share with a friend.

Increases Domain Authority

Your domain authority is how likely your business will rank in result pages when anyone searches for specific keywords or enters a query. And while it’s a prediction strategy, it is important to note that this doesn’t come from Google and your domain score doesn’t directly affect SERPS. 

So while it’s a great way to evaluate how strong a website is, it’s a prediction metric. However, domain authority tells how established and trustworthy a business is. It tells the autonomy and control a website has over the internet. Search engines often look out for how relevant and trustworthy a website is. Domain authority focuses on the latter aspects of this. 

A good domain authority score ranges from anywhere between 50-60. Anything above 70 connotes a really good domain authority. 

The best way to increase your domain authority is by positioning for quality inbound links. So when you create a post on social media, on your blog, or on other marketing channels, you’d generally want other verified publishers to link back to your website. However, this will only be super effective when you have a good domain name.

As we’ve discussed, you need a short, memorable, and premium domain name that’ll be hard to misspell. Once your domain name is prone to misspellings, you’d miss out on a lot of inbound links that could increase your domain authority.

This business Kabbage realized that its business name is prone to typo errors because a lot of people might misspell the business as ‘Cabbage’. To reduce the number of missed opportunities they probably recorded, they invested in purchasing the “www.cabbage.com” domain as well. 

So whenever anyone wants to link to their site and mistypes kabbage for cabbage, it’ll automatically redirect them to the ‘Kabbage’ website. To also effectively track the number of redirects they get from this purchase, they added a tag. 

You’d Spend Fewer Resources in Your SEO Efforts

A premium domain name is highly important in getting you those sales. While you might consider spending a lot of money on hiring more writers, building out a blog, or even other content marketing efforts, your domain name is the first step into pushing your business forward. 

When you list your business on local listings like Google My Business, search engines will spend time crawling through thousands of sites when there’s a query – yours inclusive. 

These engines are simply looking for the content searchers find useful. This could be based on the average time on page, and the number of clicks amongst a host of other unknown criteria checks.  Based on what they term relevant, you get ranked on Search Engines Results Pages.

However, if your domain name isn’t compelling or doesn’t fit into your brand in any way, you’d get fewer visits and that’ll keep pushing your page further down the other pages. You need to position your business as relevant for users to even click on your page. 

The more clicks you get, it increases your chances of ranking higher. The higher you rank on results, the more visits you’d get. And when people can always search for your business name in the future, they can always find your contact information. 

For example, for this query ‘rent house in the UK’, the first organic search result is a website with the domain “rightmove.co.uk”. 

Asides from having a UK domain, you’d see that the first result ranks higher because the brand name tells a story more than its competitor ‘Zoopla’. And that might be linked to the fact that more people would want to make the right move. So the first result would ordinarily beat the competition by just having the right name. 

It Puts You in Charge of Your Brand Perception

As a business, you’d be facing a lot of competition. Your domain name could either be a fortress that seals your brand or it could leave room for your competition to take advantage. For example, Zoom had always used the domain name ‘www.zoom.us”. 

However, with their mass expansion, they understood that any other video conferencing app could purchase the domain name ‘www.zoom.com” and redirect that lead to their site. And so in 2018, Zoom made that wise investment in purchasing that domain for their brand. Now Zoom has the final say with anything surrounding a zoom.com subdomain.

It’s also a great way to keep the scammers at bay or at least – make them work harder before they can. If you have a low-quality domain, anyone can purchase a domain similar to yours and use it to conduct fraudulent activities. We’re pretty much convinced this is why Amazon purchased the ‘Prime.com’ domain.

With a quality domain name, you don’t have to worry about your brand is in the spotlight for the wrong reason. A good domain name will reflect your business name, cover all leaks your competitors can exploit, and keep scammers away from your brand.

We also recommend purchasing any domains you think might be useful or similar to your brand now. Domain names get more expensive over time and so you’d want to ensure you have it at a cheaper price and while you still can.

You Don’t Have to Suffer Google’s Penalties

In the past, having a domain name with the same match to a keyword, ranked higher and acquired a certain level of domain authority. 

And so, to create a more leveled playing field, Google introduced the EMD update in 2012 which meant that, websites that used similar domain names wouldn’t rank just because a keyword was in their domain name.

Now after this update, it doesn’t exactly profit you to collect domains with the exact match as a keyword. However, when you opt for a more premium domain name, you’d still get quality visits but this time around lesser sanctions from Google. 

Fortnite, which was acquired by epic games in 2013, upgraded its domain name shortly after the Google update. So from the “fortnitegame.com” domain, they moved to simply “fortnite.com”. 

This new name is now a subdomain of the ‘epic games’ franchise. By removing the exact match keyword from their domain name, the new upgrade not only sounds better but still maintains the number one spot in the search results. 

Now, when you’re not up to date and you still chose to select a keyword with the exact phrase, it’ll be a lot harder to climb these results and compete with other domains that are viewed as more organic. 

However, if you previously used the EMD strategy to build your brand and you’re still getting enough valuable traffic, then keep doing what you’re doing. Better still add a similar domain to your books. Because you don’t want to risk losing all you’ve worked for.

You’ll Maintain Your Rankings and Brand Even When You Move

Easy website builders like WordPress and Wix tend to add additional costs for getting your domain. As a small business, you may have at some point, consider using the domain of whatever service your business is hosted on. But when you choose to use the free alternative, it makes you heavily reliant on their business. 

For example, this image below has a .wordpress.com extension in its domain name.

While this might seem harmless at first, moving to another web host or server, will make you lose everything you’ve worked so hard for. 

This means you’d have to start rebranding by getting a domain that’s similar to what you initially used. And if that domain is unavailable, you’d have to dedicate a marketing budget to ensure that your existing customers move with you – which might be unlikely. 

You’d also lose all your search rankings and start from ground zero. This means creating content all over again and finding healthy ways to get inbound links. 

With a premium domain name, you have stability and consistency across your brand. Regardless of wherever you move to, your company name remains the same and in your care. You can relocate to a new country, switch servers as many times as you’d want and you’d still maintain your rankings. 

For example, the Academy Self Defense is also a brand hosted on WordPress at the moment. And regardless of where they move, it’s pretty much easy to convince their users that nothing has changed. Because their branding and domain name will remain the same.

The bottom line

We understand that as a business, you’d have other priorities and you might think about going for smaller irrelevant domain names with the hopes of changing them afterward. However, not investing in a good domain name should not be your go-to budget cut. 

It’s better to invest now and continue accumulating the above-listed benefits over time. Don’t spend resources on building your brand only to lose it when you’re ready to get a more suitable domain. Purchase a premium domain name with Domainify today.